In math this week, our first grade mathematicians spent a lot of time working with dimes. They were introduced to the dime stripand it’s relationship to 10 pennies and they were able to explore and share what they already knew about a dime. Since our mathematicians already know so much about counting tens and ones, the transition to dimes and pennies was effortless! We spent half of the week working with just these two coins and then added nickels at the end of the week.

Next, we wrote and solved equations involving coins. Even though counting on is the quickest strategy for addition, we continued to worked on proving our answers with a drawing too. We used the “make a ten strategy” to demonstrate this.

And lastly, we looked at a 100-Grid. First, we focused on patterns that we could find. Our mathematicians were very good at this! One of the patterns that was noticed was that each row increases by 10 (example: 1, 11, 21, 31, 41…). We called this skip counting. We also touched on the fact that this increase is always in the tens place value and that the ones place value stays the same.

We will continue to work on these strategies more throughout next week as we perfect the make a ten strategy with teen numbers in addition and subtraction problems.